Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes

The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers

Anna Romina Guevarra

Publication Year: 2010

In Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes Anna Romina Guevarra focuses on the Philippinesùwhich views itself as the "home of the great Filipino worker"ùand the multilevel brokering process that manages and sends workers worldwide. The experience of Filipino nurses and domestic workersùtwo of the country's prized exportsùis at the core of the research, which utilizes interviews with employees at labor brokering agencies, state officials from governmental organizations in the Philippines,and nurses working in the United States.

Contents

Preface

I arrived in Manila on September 2, 2001, with an overwhelming
sense that I was entering a strangely familiar place. After sitting on a
plane filled with a group of boisterous and animated Filipina workers
who were returning home from Japan and then being immediately
greeted at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport with a cardboard
cutout of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo bearing a welcome sign ...

Acknowledgments

This book has been my hardest and longest marathon. From San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and now Chicago, writing this book
is probably one of the most solitary, exhausting, and humbling activities
in which I have ever engaged in my life. I am indebted to a community
of support that sustained me in this journey.

Abbreviations

Chapter 1: Home of the Great Filipino Worker

While waiting in a cramped space of a recruitment
agency’s reception area in Manila, a middle-aged woman sitting across
from me asks, “Where are you going?” with the certainty that I was
also a potential worker. She is one of the modern-day heroines of the
Philippines who leave the country to join thousands of her compatriots
in a crusade of hope and survival that they envision lie overseas.1 In her ...

Chapter 2: Cultivating a Filipino Ethos of Labor Migration

Every Saturday Morning, a television show called
May Gloria Ang Bukas Mo (There’s Gloria/Glory in Your Future), features
the current Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.1
In these shows, she often began with an inspiring message about the
place the Philippines occupies in the global economy and the economic
promise that foreign investments and overseas employment bring to
Filipinos. Viewers heard of potential business ventures such as the ...

Chapter 3: Governing and (Dis)Empowering Filipino Migrants

In a room filled with about thirty-five women, an
impassioned woman stands proud, shouting,“You are not yet heroes.You
are just soldiers right now!”This woman is Mildred Yamzon, cofounder of
the Women in Development Foundation (WIDF), an NGO authorized by
the Philippine state to provide pre-departure orientation seminars
(PDOSs) to prospective domestic workers headed overseas. Alternating ...

Chapter 4: Delivering “Our Contribution to the World”

On January 17, 2002, the usual hustle and bustle of Malate, one
of Manila’s busiest districts, was interrupted by a crowd of men and
women who marched through its streets. Beginning at Malate Church
and ending in the historic Intramuros, the marchers forged through
the unruliness of the everyday traffic, hopeful that their umbrellas and
bandanas would protect them from the oppressive sun of a typical ...

Chapter 5: Selling Filipinas’ Added Export Value

A bright spotlight illuminates a tiny room equipped
with a television monitor and video camera. The videographer, Marco,
directs a job applicant dressed in a maid’s uniform to the back of the
room to stand with her back against a white wall. Marco asks her to put
her feet together and her heels against the wall. He gives her a cardboard
sign that reads, “File #345: Maria Reyes,” and tells her exactly how to ...

Chapter 6: Living the Dream

In 2006, I met Gabriela, a thirty-one-year-old nurse
living in a growing suburban enclave in Arizona.1 She and her husband
had just bought a single-family home in one of the newest KB Home
communities, so new that their house address had not yet appeared on
MapQuest.2 The novelty of their home was complemented by strikingly
matching furnishings, from the dark wood–tone tables, coordinating
lamps, and even banana-leaf-shaped ceiling fan blades, all of which were ...

Chapter 7: Securing Their Added Export Value

On October 3, 2005, I received a startling voice mail
message from Eureka Incognito, a nurse I had met in Arizona seven
months earlier. “I am now in California,” she said in her usual upbeat and
excited voice. She was staying temporarily at her father’s friend’s house as
she looked for jobs in Los Angeles and San Diego. She spoke with a sense
of hope and happiness that I had not heard in a long time and especially ...

Chapter 8: Conclusion

The year 2007 was a good year for the Philippines’
overseas employment program. With more than one million workers
deployed globally, the country celebrated being ranked fourth among
developing countries for its global remittance flow of $14.4 billion
(POEA 2008). The increase in the number of highly skilled professionals
(nurses, information technology personnel, engineers) and the corresponding
decrease in the number of domestic and construction workers ...

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